Linked Data Platform 1.0 Working Draft Published

Earlier this year, the Linked Data Working Group was formed in response to a member submission (Full Disclosure: SemanticWeb.com was a co-sponsor of that submission). The original proposal put forward by IBM stated the need as, “We believe that Linked Data has the potential to solve some important problems that have frustrated the IT industry for many years, or at least to make significant advances in that direction. But this potential will be realized only if we can establish and communicate a much richer body of knowledge about how to exploit these technologies. In some cases, there also are gaps in the Linked Data standards that need to be addressed.”

As a working draft, the document published yesterday is open for public review, but The Linked Data Platform work represents a significant move forward in the creation of a standard for building enterprise systems around Linked Data. The document lays out “A set of best practices and simple approach for a read-write Linked Data architecture, based on HTTP access to web resources that describe their state using RDF.”

As Arnaud Le Hors, chair of the LDP WG and Linked Data standards lead at IBM says, “With the publication of the First Public Working Draft the Linked Data Platform Working Group has reached its first major milestone towards providing the industry with a formal definition of Linked Data and the interoperability needed for the enterprise. While a lot of work still needs to be done the WG is on schedule to deliver a W3C recommendation in early 2014 per its charter.”

For more insight from Le Hors on the impetus for this group, see this interview conducted by Ian Jacobs of W3C.